Now that most of the summer interns have gone off to college, or otherwise returned to their regularly scheduled lives, the Institute is starting to shift into fall mode: lots of travel, a busy conference season, and lots of articles and reports going out the door.
One thing I'll probably be doing is a subtle redesign of this site. Typepad has reforged the tools blog owners use to control the design and layout of blogs, and they've also added capacity for displaying RSS feeds from other sites, podcasting support, and a couple other cool new tools.
As nice as that is, just as interesting is the way they've decided to communicate this to the Typepad community: not through a FAQ or dry technical announcement, but through a series of interviews with Typepad programmers. In each interview, the programmers talk a little about what they do, what new feature they've developed, and why they wanted it (or why it's cool). Obviously it's a lot more personal and informal than a more traditional announcement, and is probably overdetermined (as the Marxists used to, and probably do still, say) for a blogging company; but I think it works, for two reasons.
First, most of us blog as a serious hobby, or are pro-am about it, adopting an informal, person-to-person mode makes plenty of sense. Second, Typepad is one of those institutions that doesn't so much have customers-- in the sense of people who just buy and use a finished product-- as a large mass of people who are constantly pushing, remixing, and creating with their service. For such a group, interviews probably work far better than a traditional corporate release.
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